Drop All Conclusions about God Almighty

It takes enormous courage for a person to look beyond the conditioning of his belief systems and admit that he knows nothing about even the most basic aspects of his life. Do you believe that you have two hands or do you know you have two hands? Even if you don't use your eyes to see them, you still know you have two hands. It is experientially clear to you. But when it comes to God, you have been told to believe; nobody told you to explore Divinity. But without an enquiring mind, we cannot know anything beyond our limited levels of existence; there will be no inner growth.

Believing cannot transform you. But if you experience the Divine, it will leave you absolutely transformed. For, where experience is absent, whatever you believe in is of no significance. What if I kept telling you from the day you were born, that this finger is God? Divine emotions will spring within you. Similarly, if I taught you that this finger is the demon, terror will arise within you. This is the nature of mind.

The mind is fluid; you can make anything out of it. How it is shaped simply depends on how it is influenced. If you look deeply, what you call your mind is really something you have borrowed from thousands of people around you. You have accumulated this mind in bits and pieces. Your mind is just your background — depending on the kind of family you come from, your education and religion, the country or society you belong to and the world you're living in.

The mind is necessary to survive in this world, but it will not take you to the Truth. This can only be done by knowing experientially, not intellectually. Whatever you know intellectually is not knowing, it's just a distortion. The intellect is just a survival tool, a limited aspect of your life. Modern man knows that survival is not enough, it is not fulfilling.

So if you want to go into deeper dimensions of life, first you need the necessary instruments. Right now you experience life with just sense organs — by seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. With this you cannot know anything beyond the physical. If you want to measure the depth of the ocean, you cannot go with a foot scale. That's what is happening with people when it comes to God, to Divinity, to Truth. People are approaching the greatest questions of life without the necessary instruments. So they jump to wrong conclusions.

People are eager to jump to conclusions. On examination, we find that what we call as our self, what we perceive as our personality, is nothing but a bundle of conclusions about life. So a spiritual process does not mean jumping to another set of conclusions. Only when you dare to exist here without conclusions, to be just a small particle of existence, then you have the possibility to know the limitlessness of creation...

Once there was a philosopher fish. As he was sitting in great misery and worry, another fish passed his way, stopped and said, "Philosopher why are you in such misery?" The philosopher fish said, "Wherever I go everybody is talking about the ocean. I want to find this ocean. I went east, west, north, south, and I can't find this ocean."

See, for the philosopher fish, belief in the ocean is not enough — he wants to experience it for himself. Now, the problem is he is also part of the ocean. He is unable to perceive the ocean because he has no adequate tool of perception. This is also true of you and God.

(The writer will conduct programmes for the public on December 13 (introductory session) and December 14-15 (2-day intensive) in New Delhi. Phone: 011-3311789, 98-103-01379, 98-100-62432. Visit www.ishafoundatlon.org)